Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 324

 

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Inside Comedy: The Soul, Wit, and Bite of Comedy and Comedians of the Last Five Decades," by David Steinberg.

Insecurity combined with arrogance is good DNA for a comedian.

So most of this you sort of know. Comedic icon. Woman ahead of her time. You might identify her comedy as “slapstick”—but that kind of sells it short. Her comedy, which was choreographed down to the smallest gesture, came from Lucy [Lucille Ball] being one of the most disciplined comedians I ever knew. Her comedy seemed free-form, and in a way it was, because it was spontaneous, unafraid, and just truly funny, except that she knew every single thing she was doing, and all those gestures—hands and legs and especially those captivating eyes, the hair tossing, and the uproarious laughs—were rehearsed and written to the tiniest detail.